A few weeks ago we were having a lazy Sunday morning, drinking our coffee and catching up on Top Chef: Masters. I don’t remember anything else about the episode except the Quickfire challenge: make an upscale version of nachos.

I’m sure each chef made something fancier than we ever could, but for the rest of the episode that’s all kept thinking about.

It ended up working out pretty perfectly — we had all the ingredients on hand. Plus, it was a great way to use up the variety of hot peppers and tomatoes we had picked earlier that week.

Ours were your standard nacho recipe, but they were so delicious, I think even Curtis Stone would have been impressed.

As the weather gets colder, our plants are on their way out. It’s a bit odd because there are new eggplant flowers and pepper flowers, but they won’t have enough time to mature. We have a few more grape tomatoes that might be ready before it gets too cold, but pretty much everything else is done. We tried to plant some fall vegetables, but that plan seems to have failed. More on that later.

Overall, it was a pretty successful year. Not the best, but it was way better than what we had last year, or even the year before. I’ll recap everything in later posts, plus share some more recipes we made when all our vegetables were thriving.

It’s been about a month since we put everything in the ground, and so far our garden looks promising. That’s not to say we haven’t had any problems.

First jalapeño of 2012.

We’ve battled everything from deer to slugs and a variety of other creatures and insects that seem set on ruining our garden. Because so much has happened in the past several weeks, I’m going to break this up into a bunch of smaller posts.

I’ll start with peppers because those seem to be our golden crop. In a little more than a week our plants have gone from a handful of blossoms on a few stalks to actual fruits starting to emerge.

We got our first “harvest” on June 19 with one jalapeño. I’m kind of amazed it came so soon, but the weather has been above average temperatures for most of the year. We love spicy food so I’m hoping this is a good sign.

Homemade jalapeño poppers from last year.

Last year, the jalapeños were super productive (we almost always had a steady supply of 6-8 peppers). At one point, I didn’t know what to do with the 20+ jalapeños we had at one time, and then I found a recipe for homemade jalapeño poppers. They were kind of a pain to make but absolutely delicious. I’d love to have enough to make those again this summer!